Brian DePalma’s Passion is a remake of a French film called Love Crime, which I reviewed separately and watched first. DePalma’s Passion is significantly different from Love Crime. Instead of a seductive/punishing mother figure boss and her insubordinate assistant, Passion has two colleagues who are more like frenemies, potential lovers or sisters than competing coworkers. Think Heathers meets Mean Girls. Instead of an American international corporation with the conflict playing out predominantly in Paris, Passion has a German international corporation that takes place in Berlin, and the majority of the dialogue is in English. DePalma’s Passion characters feel more like types than real people, but it works. McAdams plays Christine, the boss, and reprises her role as Queen Bee. Naomi Rapace, who is famous in Sweden for her depiction of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, plays Isabelle, who is a completely different Isabelle from the original. This Isabelle may not be a Queen Bee, but she is the foreign exchange student who wore all black and is not even comparing herself to the other silly girls around her. By casting Rapace, you already know that Christine may be overreaching when she decides to dominate this Isabelle. If Love Crime questions identity, Passion questions consumption and performance and asks who is the viewer and who is being viewed. Whereas Love Crime was casually opulent, Passion is gleaming, sleek and distinctive. Overall Passion’s story and mystery is more believable than the Rube Goldbergian plot of Love Crime. Though they share similar elements, DePalma tells the story in a way that leaves it a convincing mystery to the viewer until he no longer wants it to be. Unfortunately DePalma’s portraits of sexuality have always been slightly more prurient than a depiction of a character’s life as in Love Crime. DePalma is more of a peeping tom than documentarian. Whereas movies like The Rapture portray kinky sexuality as another part of daily life and boring, DePalma definitely ogles over sexuality like a kid who says, “Look at this!!!” then shoves the object in your face. DePalma continues to borrow elements from Hitchcock, but also Kathryn Bigelow’s palette in Blue Steel and has the same disorienting angles from the German Expressionist movement films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
POSSIBLE SPOILERS
DePalma changes one character from an inscrutable man to a deeply involved woman. I don’t think that it works. It creates a clique dynamic that may serve DePalma’s version of the narrative and his desire to continue the suspense once the major mystery is resolved, but ultimately does not make it a better story than Love Crime and undercuts the most effective element of Love Crime. It is the one time that DePalma’s Passion gave away too much of the plot like Love Crime. I’m not sure if his twist on the twins/sisters’ theme worked either except with respect to the mask. DePalma isn’t happy until someone is in some form of drag. When DePalma gets oneiric, it is beautiful, but occasionally bewildering. If using oneiric narrative techniques does not move the story forward or isn’t presented early enough, but adds to the mystery at the end of Passion, it does not work. While the ballet worked better visually than the movie element in Love Crime, it did not make as much sense in the story. I did buy Isabelle’s initial breakdown in Passion rather than Love Crime so DePalma’s prurient tendencies worked in that case. Whereas Passion is more explicit about the kind of work that the women do than in Love Crime and that work adds to DePalma’s themes of consumption and presentation and who is the real viewer, in the long run, using cell phone cameras could date the movie. I would recommend Passion to die hard DePalma fans
